Encefalus

Press Release: Neuropolicy Center Confronts the Biological Basis of Collective Decision Making

I found the above link in the Neuromarketing (Neuromarketing » Neuropolicy Center at Emory). It’s a press release about the opening of a new center for the correlation between brain and political behavior. 

I believe that we start to see a pattern here. At the first we simply had neuroscience. Then we had neuropsychology. After that, neuroeconomics and now neuropolitics.

There are lot’s of neurons there mate

I believe this to be a major progress in the studies of cognitive science. Until now, the connection between the brain and behavior was analyzed only in very basic levels of individual psychology. Economics and politics constitute systems more complicated than the individual level, since they are based on groups (and on a scale closer to every-day life). But now, science has started to break this frontier and has started studying for the first time what a few decades ago seemed impossible. The correlation between something so small as a neuron and its effect on invisible constructions of humongous proportions that affect our lives. 

But not only that, but this new kind of science has started getting public attention through the publication of popular psychology books. Take this example over there: Two new books on neuroeconomics and Investing and the brain. In 15 or 20 years neuroeconomics will have, hopefully, become an established field and will have gained a huge amount of valuable data. The same will happen probably with neuropolitics, although the latter is an even newer discipline.

   VS 

What I (and I believe most scientists that aspire to such disciplines) find so interesting about these fields is the fact that the brain can give us solid data. The human mind is an ever-chaning mechanism. Behaviors can get very difficult to measure. There have been numerous sociological, political and economic theories (or combinations thereof, like marxism) but none of them has managed to completely explain human behavior at that level. The reason, in my opinion, is very simple. These systems are so flux that finding laws about them can get a very daunting task. I’m not trying to formulate an attack on the fields of economics and sociology, but I believe that many times, the simple act of observation on a group of people can perturbate what might have been, pretty much like quantum mechanics work. This, along with the chaos that society is, makes the job of studying and formulating laws about any group of people extremely difficult.

However, unlike groups, which are in a constant state of motion, data collected from a brain can yield a more static approach to the subject that could bring more solid results. I’m not implying here that the most complex entity we know, with trillions of synapses that constatly reorganize themselves is the paragon of solidity, but we know that the brain has some kind of specialization circuit: some areas do this and some areas do that. Even though playing with something so complex as the brain and so small as a neuron(that we cannot see with the naked eye) may not seem the best way to approach things such as politics, this is not the case. And the reason is that it is easy to alter the measure the brain function through fMRI than to ask tons of people what they’re going to vote in the american election to get a statistical (but never completely accurate) sample. Surely, it’s impossible at that stage to predict the american elections through fMRI, but after loads of data gathered we’ll have uncovered much of the process that’s going on inside the heads of the voters.

Average George Bush voter

Of course, as always, we cannot left out criticism out of this one. Here is a paper discussing some the problems of neuroeconomics: Behavioral Economics. Maybe economics are a different sui generis system. The data garnered by neuroimaging techniques can’t tell us anything about economics because putting a man in an fMRI is much different than going with your wife to a restaurant and having to choose amongst a variety of foods or searching the internet for a new car to buy. An additional criticism concerning the neuroimaging techniques is that they are still very slow and not precise enough. This, however, has not stopped neuroscience from advancing forward. I believe that criticism at this point has the possibility of being correct, but I consider a better choice to let neuroeconomics and neuropolitics to advance before trying to tear them appart. If they are proven inadequate they will disappear by themselves, pretty much like most out-dated disciplines do.

Another criticism that has been posed on the subject is of political kind. That is, which people will benefit from the information that concerns our consumer and political behavior at brain level. This is a criticism that I consider to be of great value, as it applies not only to neuroscience, but to every science, as well. Some decades before, the science that had the burden of ethics on its shoulders was physics. The creation of the first atomic bomb was a huge moral dilema. Now, the great moral dilemmas are faced not by physicists, but by neuroscientists. The new atomic bomb does not reside in a silo, but inside our brains.

VS

It’s pretty obvious that this power will be used by those who alreay have enough power. Probably, this seems a little pessimistic, but think for just a moment that the discoveries in the field of marketing have been used, not by consumers, but my marketing companies to sell more products. I believe that this could be the case with neuro-politics for example. Of course, there are thinkers like Steven Pinker who have proposed that better understanding of ourselves can lead to a better society. I believe this to be the best point of view I’ve heard so far. However, it may seem a little bit unrealistic, but still Pinker has showed us again that humanity may be getting in a better direction in the last centuries (A History of Violence). I only hope that he’s right.

Further Reading:

The Economics of Brains: A collection of research papers touts the promise of neuroeconomics.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 5:18 am and is filed under Neuro-biological, Socio-Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.